TV Review: HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER: Season 3, Episode 3: Always Bet Black [ABC]

How To Get Away With Murder Always Bet Black Review

How To Get Away With Murder: Season 3, Episode 3: Always Bet Black gives one of the Keating Five a real chance to shine and treats us to one of the show’s most subversive cases yet.

Dispatched by Annalise (Viola Davis) to find a way to track down Frank (Charlie Weber), Laurel is put in the awkward position of asking her father (Esai Morales) for help. As chief of a major tech company, her father is in a position to pinpoint the location of her missing boyfriend. The problem, aside from the obvious illegality of what she’s requesting, is that Laurel has been estranged from her dad for years, resenting him for, among other indignities, refusing to pay ransom when she was kidnapped as a teen.

Of course, that’s all in the past as far as Mr. Castillo is concerned, and he persists in trying to not just regain his daughter’s acceptance, but also her signature on an important document for his business. Souza excels in conveying Laurel’s resentment towards her father, flawlessly switching between English and Spanish as she struggles to contain her anger during her banter with him and believably rebuffing any attempts at tenderness on his part.

As for our other heroes, they find themselves in the dubious position of defending a man (Austin Basis) accused of raping and killing a prostitute. Although their client maintains that he didn’t kill that particular girl, he admits to Annalise and Bonnie (Liza Weil) that he killed another girl after she “triggered” him by belittling him and mocking his weight after he interprets her actions as sexual advances. It’s not clear if this was meant as a “take that” to certain segments of the social justice and identity politics crowd that seek to trivialize violence by equating hurtful remarks with bodily harm, but the show’s decision to use that particular term as well as the fact that it was, of all people, a straight white male saying it suggests that it was meant to be an ironic twist on the disturbingly-widespread idea that words are just as dangerous as, in this case, baseball bats. It will be interesting to see how How To Get Away With Murder explores this issue further should it do so in future episodes.